


The Minute I Know

by cerisedeterre



Category: Booksmart (2019)
Genre: Awkwardness, Dressing Room Sex, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Plans For The Future, Post-Canon, Shopping, The NSFW starts in chapter four, Vaginal Fingering, hang gliding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 16:21:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20410708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerisedeterre/pseuds/cerisedeterre
Summary: Amy's back in L.A. Does she need new clothes? Who decides? Takes place over two days of December break, after Molly and Annabelle's first term of college.





	1. Chapter 1

Molly and Annabelle meet me at LAX. I was expecting just Molly. “Uh, hi,” I say.

Then I see Molly’s text as my phone comes online. “Annabelle & I are on same plane home, so we’ll meet u at yr gate when u land. Also she is your & my ride home. We r friends now.” That last part I knew.

Molly and I have been emailing whenever I got a connection in Botswana, which is maybe four days a week. But I haven’t seen my best friend—Hope called her my wife, which is still funny—since June. Now she looks…. different. More normal. More makeup. More like Annabelle, honestly. Put-together, as Charmaine would say. It’s not a bad look, but it’s… not what I wanted. Why can’t friends just stay the same?

Everything fits into Annabelle’s SUV, or maybe it’s Annabelle’s mom’s SUV. I don’t ask. Daylight hurts: I can barely speak a grammatical sentence, and the last of my standing-upright energy goes to that big hug with Molly that I knew she’d want, and I’d want, and almost anybody else would misinterpret. Even Jared would probably say something rude. But Molly and I figured out in tenth grade that she only likes guys, and I only like girls, and she and I love each other but, you know, not that way. I haven’t loved-loved anyone that way. Or even taken anyone’s pants off that way since Hope. And Hope knows I’m here, because I told her last week, but I don’t know what she’s going to do with that knowledge. Precious knowledge. Piping-hot knowledge.

I know what I’m going to do now, though. Zzzzzzzz. Flight time from Sir Siretse Khama International Airport (GBE) to LAX, via Johannesburg and Atlanta, is 24 hours and 30 minutes, not counting two hours on the tarmac in Atlanta, and I am glad I’ve got the entirety of Annabelle’s back seat to myself.

When I wake up we’re at my house. My parents’ house. Molly hops out to ring the bell. “Hi, Doug!” says Molly, determinedly chipper. 

“We’re happy to welcome Amy’s very best friend, ahem,” my dad says. “Did you bring our favorite actual literal daughter?”

His favorite actual literal daughter is still sprawled on Annabelle’s back seat, between the luggage in the back and Annabelle, staying in the driver’s seat in order to avoid the welcome wagon. When she figures out what’s going on she opens the back door, practically drags me out until I’m standing upright, and starts to unload my backpack and duffel. I almost say “thank you for the roadside assistance” but I’m just awake enough to remember never to use that phrase around her.


	2. Chapter 2

When I wake up Molly’s there in my room, holding out my Elizabeth Warren mug. It’s full of green tea. There’s a bowl of cold soba with seaweed flakes on my nightstand. “How long was I out?” I ask her.

“What is this, a superhero movie?” she says. “It’s not like you got beat up by, I don’t know, Roger Ares.” Wonder Woman is the only superhero movie she’s seen.

“I got beat up by British Airways. How long was I out?”

“Sixteen hours.”

“Where’s my phone? Oh. There.” It’s plugged in. I look at the screen. No Hope.

Because Molly hasn’t changed and will always be my best friend, she has unpacked all my clothes and put them away and apparently started the laundry, since my bedroom hamper’s empty. She must have slept in the bottom bunk herself.

Because Molly has changed, she’s standing before me in a completely incongruous silky black and white striped top and a flowy black skirt and I do not understand who dressed her. Not Molly. Definitely not Jared. Annabelle?

“Doug and Charmaine have made us a ridiculous breakfast,” she says.

“Are we staying for that?”

“Hell no,” she says. “We’re meeting Annabelle in half an hour and she’s going to take us shopping at Pacifica?”

“Pacifica?” Pre-graduation Molly and Amy would never have been caught dead at Pacifica Arcade. We wore protest T-shirts, and thrift store finds, like those jumpsuits, and we never asked anybody except each other for fashion advice. “This isn’t a Jared thing, is it?”

“Nope. He doesn’t get back from Albuquerque till after Christmas.”

“Albuquerque?”

“Flight school.” Then I remember who’s taking us shopping. “Annabelle’s getting really into this math in public policy stuff—we’re in a Hopper College seminar together—and she kind of persuaded me that if I want to make a policy difference, rather than just doing direct actions and youth organizing for the rest of our lives, I should learn to dress better. And”—now Molly whispers—“I kind of like it.” She does look great. She gleams. She has silver earrings and mules and an Amelia Earhart silk scarf. She looks more herself than ever, more ready to get to the top of her law school class. 

Does she want to get me to look like her?

It’s a cold day by L.A. standards. I throw on my camouflage jacket, the one with the Hugo Award Winner patch and the US OUT OF NORTH AMERICA pin, and a Sleater Kinney reunion T-shirt underneath—the concert was honestly way too loud for me, but it’s a symbol—and I let Molly drag me out the door, croissant pressed into my hand by a very eager Charmaine, when Annabelle honks.

I check my phone once I’ve got my seatbelt on. Still no Hope. Our last email was five days ago. Did she even remember that I’d be here? 

Too late. We’re at the Pacifica Open Air Arcade, which has high-end mall stores, four coffee bars, and the kind of pedestrian walks and curbs and benches that become skate parks daily at 8pm. I want an iced tea, but Annabelle drags us to Privilege, whose window looks a lot like Annabelle’s wardrobe when she’s trying (that is, Annabelle minus the sweat pants and hoodies). I thought I was above these kinds of glitter and cling; now I wonder if I was just scared. 

Annabelle looks at Molly so hard I wonder whether they’re dating—they’re not, Molly’s would have told me, wouldn’t she?—and then shows me cropped satiny jackets, jeans more form-fitting than any I’ve ever worn, a filmy top that’s enticing but not revealing (I wonder if Hope would want me to wear it) with two layers and three shades of off-white stripes.

I try them all on. The dressing rooms are tiny. Annabelle waits with Molly outside. I show up wearing all three items and Annabelle vetoes the top but nods approvingly at the cropped jacket. I imagine Annabelle at a tiny wooden desk in a great stone Yale building, proving theorems while wearing the jacket, tighter on her than on me. That would be kind of hot. No, she likes guys. Only guys, as far as I know. But her shoulders…. But her hair…. What are you doing, Amy? I know what I’m doing, really: I’m in a holding pattern, distracted. I’m hanging with friends and living my second-choice winter vacation right now. I check my phone. No Hope.


	3. Chapter 3

Molly glares at Annabelle and then at me and drags me out of Privilege. “That store is so high school. That’s not the point,” she says. “Not if you want to be like Elizabeth Warren.” I do want to be like Elizabeth Warren. Who probably also has experts who dress her, and would probably also wear camouflage jackets with social justice pins if she were left to her own devices, and she were 19.

Annabelle, glumly, shaking her hair out, agrees. I love that hair. I had a few dreams where I ran my fingers through that hair. But I never will, honestly. Also, she’s not Hope.

The next store is what Molly meant. It’s called Greenwich Mean Time, I think because if you buy all your clothes there you must be from Greenwich, and people will think you’re mean. There are slacks, and blazers, and navy dresses that make you look adult without aging you up too much: at least, that’s the effect they have on Molly, who seems to be wearing one now. I hold the same thing, in my size, in front of me in a mirror and I look like a State Capitol dining room curtain. Eleventh-grade me would have bought the dress anyway on the grounds that Molly and I do everything together and if I could change the world I should be willing to wear this for Molly. Eleventh-grade me had never fought with Molly. Or had a conversation with Hope.

I find the cheapest blazer on the Greenwich Mean Time discount rack and figure I could pair it with an actual men’s button down in the unlikely event I am called upon to testify before Congress about menstrual care in Botswana before I go back. (The program isn’t over: it’s just on break till February while a new NGO takes it over. They say.) Men’s button downs are $5 vintage, and given my figure they fit me just fine as long as I can find one small enough. 

I scowl at Molly—the “I guess you’re right” scowl—and buy the blazer and loop the bag over my wrist and try to steer my old friend and her new friend to one of the coffee-and-tea carts, and I finally get that iced tea, and the three of us are about to sit down at a truly tiny outdoor table and compare Yale to Yale to the countryside near Gaborone when somebody literally pulls the chair out from under me and only because I’ve spent five months among locals with a… really intense sense of humor, and know to anticipate practical jokes, do I avoid landing hard on my tiny rear end.

“She’s coming with me,” Hope says to them, helping me up. “Get your loser ass out of here,” she says right into my face, and into my truck before I change my mind.”

Annabelle seems completely confused. Molly knows what’s going on. “You go, girl,” she mouths as she drags Annabelle away, walking backwards, so that they both still face me. And then: “Scissoring. It’s really a thing.” I hope against hope that Hope didn’t see.

That’s the minute I know where we’re going, and what’s going to happen next. At least I think I know. I hope I do.


	4. Chapter 4

I know where we’re headed the minute she takes the exit. VVV Vintage. It’s enormous, more like an airplane hangar than like one of the stores at Pacifica, and the clientele are a lot less white. Molly and I bought our entire wardrobes there at the beginning of twelfth grade. It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like a few days ago. I feel like I haven’t been back in California for centuries. I feel like I never left. The sun on my hair feels weak compared to Gaborone. I feel weak: I’m with Hope. I see the negative-tan line on her bony shoulder blade from where the camera strap must have been all summer and fall and I want to lick it. I want to get told not to lick it. I want her to tell me I’m tacky and immature and not ready for her, and then I want her to kiss me anyway. I’m watching her while she drives.

Hope parks and practically barks at me to get out of the SUV (it’s not really a truck, she just calls it a truck) and we enter side by side. Hope points me past the deep discount racks at the front, where Molly and I found those fabulous jumpsuits (well, at least I still think they’re fabulous). She points me past the racks of $5 tees, plain tees, logo tees, baby tees, fake-logo tees created by clothing companies that hoped to charge ten times that much for promoting bands that don’t exist. Gigi had one for Anti Social Social Club, and another for something called Broken Social Scene. No way those are real.

Hope eyes my shoulders, my butt, shakes her head, nods, grabs a rouched top and a cold-shoulder cotton T-shirt dress off another rack without looking at the stickers.

How does Hope want to dress me? It can’t be what Molly wants. How does she want me to look for her? I don’t think I can pull off that denim fringe. I mean, I’d be perfectly willing to pull it off her, but she’d have to be wearing it. Calm down, Amy. You don’t even know if she wants to go there. Maybe it’s just a shopping trip. She’s barely spoken to me since she shoved me into her car. Her truck. Her SUV.

“You’re gonna try these on,” Hope says, commandingly. “And this,” a green dress with zigzag stripes that might make me look like I have more up there than I do. I still wear the same bras I wore in ninth grade, and I’m starting to wonder if that will ever change. (In Botswana my size was a practical asset: less sweat. My curvier friends there used wicking fabric every night.) Hope raises her eyebrows at a Goth thing with a mesh topic, like something that Nico would wear on Runaways. “No,” I mouth. “Not me.” She glares at me and adds it nonetheless to the pile of clothes in my hands. 

We head along the wall to the back of the store, where a bored lady hands me a giant playing card with the number five on the back as we go through the curtains to the dressing rooms. There must be a dozen along this grim tiled corridor, each with its own locking door.

Oh.

Hope locks the door and shoves me hard against the far wall, so that I sit down on the dressing room bench before I know I sat down. “You’ll try on what I tell you to try on,” she says, “and you’ll wear what I tell you to wear.” She’s glowering, or mock-glowering, at me, and she sounds like a really bad actor playing a boot camp sergeant. It’s hot anyway, because she’s doing what she wants to do to me. I’m not sure where it’s going though. “Sit down!” she says, placing one hand on my shoulder. “Take off your shoes first.”

“Do we need a safeword?” I ask?

“We’re already safe,” she says, like she doesn’t know what a safeword is. Then I start giggling. Then she starts giggling.

“Did you, like, have a scene you were going to act out with me here? Because that could be hot. But, like, ask.”

Hope chews on her lip and steps back, her hand still on me. “I kind of did. But honestly-“

“Honestly?”

“I like the idea of watching you try on clothes.”

Then she moves her hand to my belt buckle and undoes it. I think she wants to do more than watch.


	5. Chapter 5

She wants to do much more than watch.

Hope slides my jeans to my ankles and presses her palm to my crotch and just keeps it there, warming me up, making me want to agitate my hips, move them around her hand while sitting down. I do that. She keeps the base of her palm right there, and sort of slides her hand sideways until she can cup her hand around the space between my clit and my butt, my cotton underwear still mostly in between her skin and my skin. My underwear has stripes that make tiny black-on-white ridges in the cotton. I wonder if she can feel them. When she presses down—no, presses up—gently, I can feel them.

I can feel her kissing me too. It’s not much like the first time—she’s gentle and slow, with barely any tongue, and she’s the one leaning forward now, my back is literally against the wall—and yet it’s exactly like the first time: she tastes like spearmint gum and pot and the charred edges of Brussels sprouts, which have always been my favorite vegetable, and sarcasm and sunshine, and kissing her is like exposing myself to the world, like saying “I’m not the girl you thought I was.” 

But I probably am exactly the girl she thought I was. The girl who’s been waiting for her.

She picks up the clothes to try on, the ones she threw on the floor before, and tosses them onto the metal bar in the corner of the dressing room

My jacket’s off. My T-shirt’s over my head, then it’s on the floor, then she has her free hand over my bra, pressing down, tweaking my nipples very gently, then less gently. I’m fibers she’s knotting into a strong, smooth rope. I’m river clay. I close my eyes and let her tongue say what I am.

I slide my open hand between her legs the way she placed hers under mine and try to give her the same pressure, moving upwards, feeling up until I can put pressure on her clit. Under her tan T-shirt dress her underwear is silky. She gets wet fast.

“What do you want?” she says into my ear. “Who do you want?”

“I want you. I want Hope. I want you,” I say to Hope, and lean forward and bonk my head on the metal bar bar. “Ow.”

“Do you want me to stop?” she says quietly.

My brain does a backflip. My forehead hurts. The rest of my body has never, ever felt better. I heard that sex involves an accelerator and a brake. I will myself to take my foot off the brake.

“I want you to go,” I tell Hope, and she kicks my feet sideways, so that I have to right myself with one hand in order not to fall down on the bench, and I see myself and Hope in a dressing room mirror as I sink to the floor, not falling but propped on my elbow, and then Hope undoes the prop and pushes me down.

“I hear it gets dry in Botswana,” she says, her palm still between my legs. 

“So dry,” I say.

“I bet you didn’t have much of a chance to get wet.”

“Not much,” I say. “But I thought of you.” 

“Did you now,” she says. “Alone for six months and you couldn’t do better than a basic hot girl who peaked in high school, huh?” She’s kneeling now, straddling me, looking me in the eyes.

“I wasn’t alone,” I say.


	6. Chapter 6

“I wasn’t all alone,” I repeat, looking up at Hope’s pleased, interrogating eyes.

“Weren’t you now.”

“There was this girl Gillian—and she wanted to show me—“

Hope knows every bit of this information, because she got weekly emails from Gaborone. But she wants to extract it from me in person.

“She wanted to show me a better way—“

“Yes?”

“To do the thing I do when I’m alone.” I knew how to do it before I had a name for it, and Gillian wasn’t sure how inexperienced I was—she came from the Netherlands, where it’s part of middle school sex ed. Her long straight black hair fell all over me when she took it out of her ponytail and splayed herself across me, her linen shirt on my bare belly, to show me her technique. Even then, sometimes, I thought of Hope.

“What did she show you?”

“I didn’t have to move my whole body. She showed me how I could find the—the best little spaces inside me.” I want to let Hope be the one to say clit.

“She showed you your clit. Oh, that’s sweet! Can you find mine?”

I press my own hand against her again—she’s still got her underwear on—and there’s the ridge, and there’s the hood where her clit would hide, and where it should be getting—yes, there it is. “There is it,” I say. “Can I see it?”

Then she pulls me over on top of her, and I swear there’s a name for this move in competitive gymnastics, which I now know she did up until tenth grade, when she quit in disgust, because she likes being able to do things with her body that most people can’t do, but she hates being told what to do. She’d make a good direct action leader, I think, and a good girl Spider-Man—Spider-Woman?—and then I can’t think at all because I’m on top of her again and I’m kissing Hope with my hand down her underwear, feeling her clit emerge under my fingers, with my leg between her legs, my belly over her flat belly, and time is speeding up and slowing down again, and she’s gasping and panting and then breathing very, very slowly, closing her eyes and then looking up at me, at me, Amy, with no sarcasm at all.


	7. Chapter 7

Everything after that is warm and out of focus for me, and maybe for her. It's like I came as soon as she came. She closes her eyes and smiles and after eternity she opens them. She sits up and turns me around and props me up again on the bench like a really turned-on rag doll, and she takes something that buzzes out of her purse—V for Vintage, I think, V for Velocity, V for Vulva, V for Vibes—and I dreamily imagine that I’ve been turned into a vibraphone, that’s a jazz instrument, because she’s playing me, up and down with her fingers across my ribcage.

She has her other hand on the side of my boobs, which feel so small sometimes compared to other girls my age I think they're barely boobs at all but right now they're real and they're full of feeling and she's flicking my nipple, gently, less gently. Did I tell her I liked that? Did I tell her I did it to myself sometimes? Did I tell her in email?? She stops flicking and moves that hand down my ribs, down my side, over my belly-button, plain and warm.

And then the V gets near my V and it’s not a jazz instrument at all, it’s some kind of really intense plucked-string percussion, she’s playing me until I sing all the notes, I am a resonant chamber opening up inside, reverberating, resounding. It’s all I can do not to sing at the top of my voice in this dressing room in a vintage store, my back arches and my chin points up and I’m absolutely ready to come and I’m used to coming silently in my room with Ling Ling but I don’t know now, I feel like Hope’s about to break me, and that’s what I want, to be broken in half and put together again by this hot girl who doesn’t take anything seriously except her photography and, now, me, I'm fluid, she sees me all at once, she sees inside me, I’m developing, she’s developing me, she’s pulling me out of my bath, I’m coming, I’m coming, what's the sound of coming, Hope, Hope, Hope, Ling-Ling, my—

I make a sound, it's a loud sound, I’m not sure what it is, but as I’m making it I come so hard that I pitch forward right onto Hope, who catches me, and while she’s holding me semi-limp in her maybe-not-really-so-surprised arms the attendant asks, over the high dressing room wall, “Is everybody alright in there? I heard something.”

Hope says “We’re really impressed by the green dress. We are totally taking that! Do you mind if we take a bit longer about the rest? My friend is kind of indecisive today.”

“That’s fine,” the attendant says, and I can guess from the echoes that she hasn’t come close to the room—she’s still thirty feet away, in her folding chair.

“I’m not indecisive at all,” I manage to say. “I know what I want.”

“You want me,” Hope says.

“I want you.”

“I want you.” Hope pauses. “I also want to take some cool pictures of you on your first full day back, and I want a seitan lobster roll before the vegan sea shack closes. So pick up that dress and get ready to get out of here.” She’s slowly stepping back into the clothes she took off, very slowly releasing me down to the bench, so I can put myself together, very slowly. I’m still shaking. I want this feeling to come again.

I like the green dress, too. It’s me. “Can we… try on other stuff later?” I manage to ask. “Before I go back, I mean. I’ve got a few weeks.”

“I have a whole wardrobe picked out for you,” Hope says. “Even a basic hot girl like me knows some things you haven’t learned about how to dress.”

“As long as you can dress me,” I say. “Where to next?”

“There’s a swimwear shop on Llevanova,” Hope says. “By the beach. They have the very best changing rooms, too.”

“You’re on.” Then I pause. “The safeword is ‘grand piano.’”

“Not Ling Ling?” Hope asks.

“Who told you that?”

“I guessed it,” Hope says, smirking. “From where she was when you sent me a picture of you on your bed. There wouldn’t be other reasons for Ling Ling to be all the way down there. I mean, I sleep with mine too, but I sleep with them next to my head.”

“I’ll sleep next to your head,” I say. I thought it would sound sarcastic and cool but of course it just comes off as a sincere offer.

“You can’t sleep at my house,” Hope says, “and you know why not, and I wouldn't fit into your--" she pauses-- "_bunk beds._ Especially not with Ling Ling." I blush hard. "Do you want to camp on the beach?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re on.”


	8. Afterword

“They’re camping on the beach together. Tuesday before the New Year’s thing,” Molly tells Annabelle over eggs and avocados. The sun’s almost blinding. Decadent brunch, Molly thinks. Annabelle just wants to chill and not have to meet anyone else from school yet.

“It worked,” Annabelle says. “I know it would work. When you had the idea I wasn’t even sure I had Hope’s number.”

“Amy sometimes… I love her but sometimes she needs some encouragement, a push from outside, to do what she wants to do. To take risks, you know?”

“Don’t we all.” Annabelle puts her sunglasses back on and sprinkles more pico fruta on her eggs. “No, wait. She doesn’t.” 

Annabelle points up to the sky, high above the patio, where somebody in a hang glider is sprinkling glitter onto the city block. The hang glider swoops low. The glitter shimmers and disperses. The pilot is Gigi. The bottom panels of the hang glider say THIS IS MY ART.

“She does, though,” Molly says, waving back at Gigi as the glider catches an updraft. “Maybe everyone does.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Cautious Clay song that plays in the movie during That Scene. Has anyone made a good Amy/Hope post-canon playlist? We're gonna run out of lyrics from That Song if not.


End file.
